With the proliferation of mobile devices, it is becoming increasingly necessary for mobile device users to remotely view and transport documents. Viewing and/or storing documents on mobile devices can create concerns for both privacy and security since the physical location of the mobile device is often difficult to control.
Regarding privacy, while it may be acceptable to view a document in a private office, it may not be acceptable to view the same document in a different location (e.g., in a public location such as on a train). For example, a doctor can adequately protect a patient's privacy while viewing the patient's records in an office, but should not view the same records on a train where other passengers could potentially see the records. It is often desirable for an organization, such as a hospital or doctor's office, to control how and where a document can be viewed by the organization's employees.
Regarding security, corporate files and resources are often managed using a perimeter based security model, where only authorized information is allowed to cross the perimeter (e.g., only particular documents can be accessed outside of a corporation's internal network). However, with the proliferation of devices, technologies, and services that make it easier and easier to transport data, the perimeter model is becoming increasingly more difficult to maintain.
Companies often maintain a perimeter model through physical segregation. For example, a security sensitive organization can maintain two physically separate infrastructures: an infrastructure internal only to the organization (e.g., an intranet), and an externally connected infrastructure (e.g., with limited availability to employees outside of the internal infrastructure). However, organizations are often unable to maintain both infrastructures due to, for example, a need for external access to documents (such as from both a business standpoint and for human convenience). Further, most devices used within such an organization can download internal information and easily transfer it elsewhere (e.g., USB sticks/devices, laptops, external hard drives, etc.). Such devices can render the perimeter model useless. Further, while cloud storage platforms (for example, Dropbox™) are proficient for file sharing, corporate environments have been slow to adapt such platforms due to the lack of security.
One way to manage mobile access to secure documents to provide a special viewer application in which securely redacted documents can be viewed in the same way as with commercially available applications, but the viewers have limited functionality compared to that of standard viewing applications (e.g., the special viewer has no save function to prevent the viewer from saving the document). However, each time a new format or version of the document is generated, a new viewer must also be provided along with the document, which can increase management costs and deployment time. Further, if the special viewer application is not widely supported, it can hinder the spread of technology because the document cannot be opened otherwise.